The doorbell rang unexpectedly. She was thinking, in the shower, and nearly didn’t respond. Throwing on a robe, she asked who it was and she heard him say: Your father. She opened the door partway, and said she couldn’t talk, that she was late. Only later did she realize that she hadn’t taken the chain lock off the door.
She thought about Lois the way some people keep Holden Caulfield in mind, to check their humanity, to see if they’re still young. Jimmy teased her about her passion to remember, while other people, he told her, have a passion to forget. “It’s almost a mission for some people — to forget.” He said this to her while she studied Spinoza, on speed. He was looking at imperceptible progress. The sister she shared the apartment with was out of town, and Jimmy could stay all night if he wanted. She wanted him to. Jimmy stared at her as she read and she found it comforting. “What do you think of Spinoza?” he asked as she was leaving for school. “I think it doesn’t matter what I think. Either I’m crazy or everything is going in circles.” “That’s philosophy. You’re not crazy.” Her legs began to shake. She hadn’t taken much speed since she’d kicked the habit, in a manner of speaking, because she wouldn’t have put it that way, then. The subway ride was hell. By the time she got to class, and was handed the test by the sincere Catholic poet/philosopher who led the class, and thought on his feet in front of them like a performing seal trained to wonder why, she could barely remember anything. Mr. Arnold walked over to her and suggested she start writing. She looked at him, benignly, and something snapped so that she lifted her ballpoint pen and her hand began moving as if she were doing automatic writing. “You shouldn’t do speed at all,” Jimmy said. “You’re one to talk,” Jane said. He said he could handle it and that he didn’t have to take tests about Spinoza. Jane thought about dropping out.
Felix was in one of his high German moods, or so Jane put it. His girlfriend was coming back from Spain. Jane herself was nonplussed, not being, in her mind, anything like a girlfriend. “I’ll handle it,” he told her. “What’s there to handle?” she answered. “Let’s go see a movie at the museum.” Felix was looking at his foot and muttering to himself. “This is boring,” Jane protested. “It’s raining, you’re looking at your foot, I have to read some stuff I don’t want to…” “And…?” Felix asked. “And nothing.” There were a few, maybe twenty more minutes of this kind of nothing that occurs between people who spend a great deal of time together and probably shouldn’t. “It’s all dead in here,” Felix nearly shouted as they went around on the second floor — the permanent collection — of the museum. “Dead.” There’s nothing permanent was his modernist point, a point not at all lost on Jane, the way Felix considered sex was. Felix railed against museums, it was still raining, Jane was barely listening, and they went into the museum’s auditorium to watch some Bruce Conner films. “The first time I ever came to see a movie here I was with Jimmy,” Jane whispered as the lights went down. Felix sank deeper into his seat and lit a cigarette. They were kicked out right after. “See those uniforms those men — those doormen — wear, look at those guys, Jane.” “I don’t want to look at uniforms. Stop trying to distract me from being pissed off at you, you asshole.” Felix walked defiantly up to one of the Plaza doormen and started a conversation with him. In German, as the doorman had come not so long ago from Berlin and worked in a large hotel there. He told Felix that rich people were the same the world over.
That anyway was what Felix told Jane the doorman said, but Jane withheld belief. “You never really believe me,” Felix told her, “I can feel that and it’s because you’re from the suburbs of this shitty country.” “And where are you from — Switzerland — a bunch of mountains, some chocolate, and a clock. A lot of clocks. You think being an artist isn’t middle class?” was Jane’s final rejoinder. They went downtown silently together. She got off before him and went back to her apartment. He continued for a few more stops and went to his storefront and there she was, his girlfriend Andrea back from Spain. It was nearly the end of winter, that’s why it was raining so much.
Jane hated spring, when the air smelled so alive and people took off their coats and their figures showed. Spring and summer, the terrible times to be fat. “You’re not fat, Jane, you’re overweight.” Her Uncle Larry was the only one she allowed to tease her. He was even fatter but he was fun. “Bugsy Siegel wasn’t going to allow the syndicate to build another hotel in Vegas unless they bailed him out. He was going to squeal. They got him on a train,” Larry went on. He’d told her the story before but it didn’t matter. “Hemingway was a bum. We fished together around Cuba. Think I’m fat. He never stopped drinking.” They were driving around Manhattan in Larry’s convertible, a pale yellow Buick with a white top. “And what about sex? I won’t tell your father,” he said and puffed on his cigar. “There’s nothing to tell, Uncle Larry. I think I’m in love with someone who’s not in love with me and someone who likes me — that way — it never even occurs to me,” Jane said and looked at the Flatiron Building, with its funny triangular shape. “The whole family’s crazy,” Larry said. “No reason you should be an exception but listen to me, kid. Try to have a good time. I’m just learning that. There’s not too much else. Have a few laughs.” The sun was setting as he drove her back to her apartment. The air was heavy with nostalgia. “Take it easy,” he said at her door. “Look at your father — he worries night and day — and where does it get him. There’s no percentage in worrying.” Larry still played the horses even though business was worse than ever. “You’ve gotta have some fun in life, right?” Jane hated spring.
Part III
Chapter 7
Mark read aloud from his notebook: “Once I was in a sentimental hospital. The nurse’s uniform was starched, and her hands soft, the fingers wrinkled, as if she’d been in the bathtub all day long. When I cried out, she heard me, rushing to my bedside, a line of concern etched into her noble brow. A hand quickly laid on my feverish forehead, she soothed me and restored my soul.…” Mark repeated “my soul” and faltered. “They talked about the soul.”
Mark dangled, like a pendulum, over sentimentality and cynicism, his direction changing, reflecting a kind of weather. While he was sensitive, it was a sensitivity not unlike that experienced under laughing gas. You’re numb and don’t care about anything and you don’t know if you’re able to control your facial muscles or not. When pain comes, in this indifferent state, it is bad, worse, because you have been lulled into a kind of inviolability, Mark’s favorite word, next to epicene. Most of the time you don’t feel anything, as if encased by a prophylactic. All this led him to the Pre-Raphaelites. He told Grace that pubic hair was absent from their paintings of nude women, that it was discovered later, that all the hair was on top, mounds and mounds of it. Grace slid off the barstool and walked to the jukebox, where she watched the record turn. Mark was rejected by some men because they were straight, he rejected others because they were too serious, and some rejected him because he was too much of a woman, or not enough of one. “I’m a displaced person, a country without a man. A guest in my own body.” “You have beautiful eyes,” Grace told him. “The doorway to the ignored soul,” he muttered. His Bible, his comfort, was “Notes on Camp,” which he insisted Grace read as a way to know him. He told her some people would call her a fag hag. She said, “They can go fuck themselves.” He said, “I love you when you’re brutal.”